1. Field of the Invention
Aspects of the present invention relate to a method and system to compress and decode mesh data with random accessibility in a three-dimensional mesh model, and more particularly, to a method and system to compress and decode mesh data that performs random access of mesh data in a three-dimensional mesh model.
2. Description of the Related Art
Three-dimensional mesh data processing and displaying technology can be applied to diverse fields (such as CAD (Computer Aided Design), computer graphics, computer games, virtual reality, medical images, etc.) using mesh data including geometry information of vertexes constituting meshes and connectivity information among the vertexes.
Various methods of compressing and decoding such three-dimensional mesh data have been proposed. For example, “G. Taubin and J. Rossignac, Geometry Compression Through Topological Surgery, ACM Transactions on Graphics, Vol. 17, No. 2, 84-115p, 1998”, “R. Pajarola and J. Rossignac, Compressed progressive meshes, IEEE Trans. On Visualization and Computer Graphics vol. 6, pp. 79-93, 2000”, and Korean Patent Unexamined Publication No. 2004-0090009 relate to the improvement of a compression rate of three-dimensional mesh data.
On the other hand, there has been an attempt to generate a three-dimensional mesh model by digitizing art work or cultural property and to process the generated three-dimensional mesh model through a graphic processing device. However, as the three-dimensional mesh model for the art work or the cultural property is generated, large-capacity mesh data may be generated in order to express in detail enormous and complicated shapes of the art work or the cultural property.
In addition, since large-capacity mesh data is stored in a memory during processing of the three-dimensional mesh model, overload may result in the system or a problem may occur during processing of the large-capacity mesh data. In addition, according to the existing simple compression of mesh data, mutual dependence exists between the compressed data. Thus, accessing and decoding only a part of the whole compressed data is difficult.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method and system capable of easily accessing and decoding a part of the whole mesh data in a three-dimensional mesh model.